Front Porch
We are heading into a future that no one can see, mediated by powerful new technologies that will exert unprecedented power over our lives — whether for good or for ill, and probably both. Change is coming.
Yet we Americans, conservatives and liberals alike, tend to have very shallow imaginations when it comes to imagining societies other than the ones we grew up in. Cultures and religions are not all the same underneath, except to the extent that we force them to be so. Other countries are not exotic versions of America, with their own versions of our same strengths and our same faults. Some of them are radically different.
The Aztecs, for example, believed in the necessity of daily human sacrifice and other nauseating cruelties, not because they were primitives — their urban centers were more beautiful and more advanced in their structures and planning than equivalent cities at …
Critic's Corner
Dolly Parton & Tim Curry
Dolly Parton and Tim Curry were two of the most culturally important people alive. Both were icons that encapsulated the American spirit in such a rock ‘n’ roll way. They were over-the-top, groundbreaking, and amazing at what they did. They also were both amazing people. They say that celebrity deaths happen in threes, but I think Dolly and Dr. Frank-N-Furter had enough personality to cover the third one. I was devastated to hear of their passing. I called my two best friends and we all cried and talked about what they meant to us in our lives and childhoods.
Dolly Parton gave us anthems, books, an amusement park, and Duncan Hines banana pudding cake. Tim Curry gave us three rock albums, Clue, the Sweet Transvestite in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the best scene in Home Alone …
I Tell, U Ride
The Telluride Bluegrass Festival is Finger-Pickin’ Good
Who are all these strangers gathering to hear my mountain music?
Lord have mercy, y’all
I’ve been in Telluride, Colorado, for twenty minutes when I meet a man named Dean at the entrance to Town Park, the town’s 36-acre festival and recreation grounds. Staring blankly toward Ingram Falls at the east end of the box canyon, I imagine the earth moving. Shadows linger beneath the aspen groves; snowmelt in the San Miguel River makes a soft murmuring; the rugged San Juan Mountains pierce the low-hanging sky. A fearsome, ecstatic landscape. It’s almost too much for me.
“Hey,” Dean asks. “Are you alright?” He’s in his fifties, dressed in a blue button-up, khaki shorts, and brown leather flip flops. He wears an expression of mild concern. “Yeah,” I say, “I think so.”
Since I am a first-timer in Telluride, and since the Town Park campground has been full for nearly five days always, Dean offers to help make sure I’m squared away. I am a suspicious Southern type, but something in his …
